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are fortunate in possessing an unrivalled institution in the Royal Gar- 

 dens at Kew, which, still maintains, and under its present able Director 

 has enormously developed, the old tradition of botanic gardens as a 

 centre in our vast empire, through which botany renders scientific ser- 

 vice to our national progress. 



4T. In Britain, consequent perhaps on our colonial and over- sea pos- 

 sessions, the systematic side of botany continued predominant long after 

 morphological and physiological work had absorbed the attention of the 

 majority of workers and made progress on the continent. Not that we 

 were wanting in a share of such works, only it was overshadowed by 

 the prevalent taxonomy, which in the hands of many no longer bore 

 that relation to its useful applications which had in the first instance 

 given it birth, and had become little more than a dry system of nomen- 

 clature. 



48. The reaction of a quarter of a century ago, which we owe to the 

 direct teaching of Sachs and De Bary and the influence of Darwin, 

 many of us can remember; in it some who are here today had a share. 

 Seldom I think is a revolution in method and ideas of teaching and 

 study so rapidly brought about as it was in this instance. The morpho- 

 logical and physiological aspect of the subject infused a vitality into 

 the botanical work which it much needed. The biological features of 

 the plant- world replaced technical diagnosis and description as the aim 

 of teachers and workers in this field of science. No weightier illustra- 

 tion of the timeliness of this change could be found than in the atti- 

 tude of medicine. But a few years ago he would have been rash who 

 would predict that botany would for long continue to be recognised as 

 a part of university training essential to medical students. Its utility 

 as ancillary to materia medica had lost point through the removal of 

 pharmacy from the functions of the physician. But what do we see 

 now ? Not the exclusion of botany from the university curriculum of 

 medical study, but the recognition to such an extent of the fundamental 

 character of the problems of plant-life, that it is now introduced into 

 the requirements of the colleges. 



49. But if the old taxonomic teaching was stifled by its nomenclature, 

 there is, it seems to me, a similar element of danger in our modern 

 teaching, lest it be strangled by its terminology. The same causes are 

 operative as of old. The same tendency to narrowing of the field of 

 vision, which eventuates in mistaking the name for the thing, is ap- 

 parent. With the ousting of taxonomy, and as the laboratory replaced 

 the garden and museum, the compound microscope succeeded the hand- 

 lens, and for the paraphernalia of the systematist came the stains, 

 reagents, and apparatus of microscopical and experimental work as the 

 equipment necessary for the study of plants, the inwards rather than 

 the outwards of plants have come to form the bulk of the subject mat- 

 ter of our teaching, and we are concerned now more with the stone and 

 mortar than with the general architecture and plan of the fabric ; we 

 are inclined to elaborate the minute details of a part at the expense of 

 its relation to the whole organism, and discuss the technique of a func- 

 tion more in the light of an illustration of certain chemical and physi- 

 cal changes than as a vital phenomenon of importance to the plant 

 and its suroundings. This mechanical attitude is quite a natural growth. 



